


Aftertaste

by kangeiko



Category: Alias
Genre: Community: fanfic100, F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-31
Updated: 2007-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-07 14:56:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/66245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kangeiko/pseuds/kangeiko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>When Jack was maybe 29, he got stupid and got caught. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Aftertaste

**Author's Note:**

> fanfic100 Jack Bristow and Arvin Sloane #39 - Taste. My table is [here](http://kangeiko.livejournal.com/113677.html).

When Jack was maybe 29, he got stupid and got caught. He's never told Sydney, because he sees no reason to upset her. He never told Laura for the same reason and, later, hoped that Irina had not heard of it. It wasn't so much what he'd gone through as how easily he'd been caught that rankled; a tattling waiter outside of _Pravda_ one evening, and he'd been disappeared from the streets of Prague most efficiently.

Say what you like about them, but the KGB had been decades ahead of the CIA in extracting information from resisting hostiles, and they'd done their best with him. What had followed his midnight trip had been a little over a week of what the CIA psychiatrist would later describe as 'interrogation'. He supposes that it wasn't termed torture because he got to keep all of his limbs and digits, and maybe that was something to be thankful for.

Oddly, he doesn't remember that much of his time there, or where he had been held, in fact. He'd fought his way free - somehow - and had stumbled out into the streets, rather surprised to find himself in Tallin, of all places. His contact, once he'd managed to find a safe spot to send out a tracer, had been equally astonished to have to send an extraction team to Estonia.

All he remembers of this lost time is an endless stretch of dark with bright, staccato bursts of light and sound, and, later, carved statues and Tallin's sloping roofs, fourteen different case endings making the local tongue impenetrable. (And a child - hadn't there been a child? - shyly offering him a stick of marzipan.)

"Don't push at it, Agent Bristow. Just tell me what you remember. The rest will come naturally."

Well, it _hadn't_, and a pox on psychiatrists and their thrice-damned reports in any case. All he had was a vague memory of flashing lights, and the lingering aftertaste of… something (marzipan?).

"You could try hypno-therapy," Arvin had suggested one day, sounding rather doubtful, and Jack had glared at him balefully. "All right. What _do_ you remember?"

Jack hesitated, Arvin watching his reactions expressionlessly. "Marzipan," he said eventually. "I remember marzipan."

Arvin frowned, perplexed and frustrated, and that had been the end of it.

A week after Laura 'died' - three days before the FBI would knock on his door - he found a carefully sealed plastic box in one of the kitchen cupboards. Inside were bright-coloured miniature fruits, rich and glossy as only marzipan glaze can be. Laura's neat handwriting on a note tacked to the outside of the box outlined what was left to make - _and Sydney wanted butterflies, too - maybe a mock gingerbread house?_.

"Look, Sydney," Jack had said, and lifted her so she could see inside. "Look what your mummy made for us before she had to go."

*

fin


End file.
